The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (89 page)

Nothing could stand before him. He offered no mercy. He unleashed workings no practitioner had ever considered, because so few men of his power had ever been willing to walk in front of an infantry line. He broke shields and baffled visions. He mimicked darkness and light. He raised phantoms, and then, bored, dropped lines of fire that broke ranks.

Eventually—horrified—the Wild threw everything it had left at him—power and creatures alike. Instead of concentrating their efforts on flanking the company and winning the battle, the Wild responded instinctively to Power.

Ser Gavin rode easily by Prince Tancredo as they cleared the ridge, moving from west to east—crushing knots of resistance—and then Sauce came.

“We’re in it!” she roared. “Come on!” When no one moved faster, she said, “We’re dying! Get a fucking move on!”

Gavin ignored the prince’s sputtering outrage. He raised his lance. “Lead us!” he called.

Sauce turned her horse. They rode side by side for long minutes, and behind them, the Occitan knights and farther down the ridge, Lord Montjoy’s western knights formed a long, thick line.

Riding sideways on a hill always tempts a horse to descend, and over the next third of a mile they went too far down so that, when they came to the edge of the main battle, the banners of the Galles were high above them, almost due north. The company’s Saint Catherine could just be seen, and a big, black banner and, farther along, a bubble of gold that seemed to move and cast fire.

Gavin turned to the prince. “Your grace, we must charge. That is my brother’s standard.”

The prince looked up the hill—scattered with rocks, and overhung with trees of every side.

“This is not the ground,” he said slowly. And then shook his head.

“Yes,” he said suddenly. “Form! Form on me!” he roared in Occitan, and a hundred knights rode to his side—men fell in the rush to join their prince.

To the west, some of the Count of the Border’s better disciplined men were higher on the ridge side and better formed. Sauce rode at them, waving. To her shock, a crossbow bolt hit her breastplate—and
whanged
away into the trees. She rocked in her war saddle and turned her helmeted head to see a line of crossbowmen—she ducked, far too late.

Her horse died. She fell—one long fall and two bounces…

She rolled to her feet and drew her dagger, the only weapon to survive the fall, and turned to face the three men who came at her, all with swords.

“
C’est une pucelle
!” shouted one. He laughed.

They
all
laughed. And in that laughter, they became all the men she’d ever hated. Two moved to flank her, and her hip hurt, and the earth was rumbling and the rain suddenly felt so hard—

Sauce moved. She got her back against a downed tree and rolled over it, kicking high, and then she was between the two who’d tried to go around her. She rammed her dagger into the side of one’s head—in, and out—and her knee crushed the second man’s testicles as her gauntleted hand broke his nose and one finger penetrated his left eye. She let gravity take him, but kept his sword, and turned.

The crossbowmen were winding. The third man was two paces away—at a dead run, buckler raised.

Sauce rolled her right wrist and her borrowed sword’s point came on line. It went between the man’s buckler and his sword—he’d had poor teachers—and went into his neck almost to the hilt. Sauce used the dagger as a crowbar to scrape him off her blade, dumped his screaming near-corpse to the ground, and ducked behind the log as the crossbows came up.

She had the satisfaction of seeing Ser Gavin’s knights sweep across the
back of the line of crossbowmen, uncontested. The ambush had caught only her.

She heard Gareth Montjoy’s war cry, and saw the border knights charge.

The crossbowmen were steady. They loosed, and immediately spanned, and a dozen knights’ saddles were empty.

Sauce crawled under the log as the crossbowmen began to span again, and ran, bent double, in plate armour—no mean feat.

There were thirty—no, more than fifty of them.

Sauce ran, light-footed, through the hobblebush and gorse, and they finally noticed her.

Ten paces out, and one had his weapon reloaded.

He aimed it. It was enormous, and she had no tree to save her, so she rolled forward like the acrobat she had once been. The ground was soft—too soft—and she scissored her armoured legs to get over the roll—she was not dead, but up again.

She got in among them as they began to draw their swords. The more experienced of them simply ran—they could not face Sauce and a charge from a line of knights. But the sword killed one, and the dagger another, and then the ground rumbled, the earth shook, and suddenly, Sauce thought to fall flat.

A horse kicked her in the back plate.

And then the charge was past her.

She got up.

She looked slowly around, and then popped her visor.

And stood, and shook.

“That was stupid,” she said to no one.

Then she started walking to where she could see Saint Catherine gleaming red in the rain. To her left, a beautiful horn played three ringing notes. Almost in front of her, a company of Gallish knights met the Occitans head-on.

A beautiful horn sounded three long, clear notes.

The brigans—big, well-drilled men in heavy armour—were giving ground one grudging step at a time. The company now had the hill behind them, and they scented victory. Neither force wanted to lose any more men. There was an endless, nightmare intensity—a spurt of violence, a single killing like a murder, and then sullen heavy breathing. Perhaps they all feared the dragons had taken the issue out of their hands. Perhaps they merely wished to live. But they—the island of professional soldiers of both sides in a vast battle of beasts and amateurs—had slowed to a desultory slaughter.

Toby became aware, at some point in the fighting, that his knight had just one hand, and was fighting with, of all things, a curved falchion. He had a moment to breathe—one of the captain’s little workings had just
killed a dozen men, and Toby—like every man-at-arms around him—chose to grab two breaths instead of pushing forward into the gap.

He burrowed to the left, to get back into the spot behind the captain. His spot had been taken by—of all people—Diccon, a virtually unarmoured boy who now wielded the captain’s heavy spear.

“I’ll kill ’em all,” Diccon gasped.

He had two wounds, both bad, both showing white bone.

The brigans gave a few more steps.

Off to the right, there were war cries, and shouts—even through the rain. A red banner showed for a moment.

The captain turned back and flipped his visor open. “Ser Bescanon, bless his black heart,” he said. He stared into the rain as if by will alone he could see through it.

“You should step out of the line,” Toby heard himself say.

The captain smiled. “I should,” he agreed. “But I won’t.” He flipped his visor down and crouched slightly, as he always did when he fought. “Come on, you bastards,” he shouted through his visor.

Twenty lances heard him, and moved forward.

The Fairy Knight ordered Bescanon’s charge, and it had the smallest effect. At first.

Bescanon trotted his thirty lances over the crest and looked down on the maelstrom. He looked left, where the Faery Knight, outlined in lurid green sorcery, sat a rearing stag like a horned centaur. His knights—the survivors of the dragon’s breath—and all his people were locked in death grips with the very centre of the enemy line—a huge behemoth, tentacled
hastenoch
, too many imps and wolves and a wing storm of barghasts.

Bescanon pointed his wedge at the side of a swamp creature, couched his lance as if in the lists, and slapped down his visor.

“Charge,” he called.

Sauce saw the company banner and the charge. Bescanon—she knew his coat armour—vanished into the titanic melee to the west of the armoured brigans. She kept moving, trying to reach the banner—the Saint Catherine—and she prayed as she walked. She had the oddest position—a spectator in the midst of an enormous battle. Both sides seemed to have spent their reserves. Even Morgon Mortirmir merely glowed with protective energy. No more missiles rained from his fingertips.

In the time it took to power a tired, armoured leg over a log, it began to change.

Bescanon’s small force killed two
hastenoch
, gored by lances in their unarmoured flanks until they fell—and the war horses pounded the imps to red meat, although a few fell in turn.

Then, suddenly, something gave—and the Faery Knight shot out of the
melee and into the churned and boggy grounds behind it. He turned his great stag, red to the fetlocks, and began to harry the behemoth. And then the edges of the melee began to collapse, and men—who had been fighting savagely, hand to hand—came out of the trees to the left, with painted Outwallers amongst them, shrieking war cries.

Arrows began to strike the behemoth, even in the pouring sheets of rain. And almost, the great monster might have been a victim—something from the art on the rocks at the edge of the inner sea, or perhaps some cave all in the south. Ringed by irks and men, it took blow after blow, and trumpeted its rage and sorrow—to die alone, far from kin, to be tormented by these tiny predators, to fall for so little gained—

Its tragic trumpet-call pierced the rain and sounded for every creature that died in the mud that day.

And then it fell, and the Faery Knight was free. Like the bursting of a dam, his Wild Hunt spilled over the ridge at last, and fell into the flank of the mounted melee where fully armoured Occitan hacked uselessly at fully armoured Galle. The Jacks—those that survived dragon’s breath and behemoth’s tusk and irk’s spear—found themselves in the flank of the Gallish knights and poured arrows into their horses… wet arrows from damp strings.

The Galles began to die.

The Faery Knight rode—almost alone, a vision of scarlet and white—across the back of the fight—he rode hundreds of paces, almost at arm’s length from his foes, along the back of their hordes, and his own household knights flitted at his side, faster than a breeze in the woods. The rain masked them, but Sauce thought she’d never seen anything so fine, and the Red Knight thought the same, and Ser Gavin, intent on his own fight, and Morgon Mortirmir, were awed even after everything they’d seen.

The Faery Knight’s handful seemed to skim the ground—along the wide, shallow trough of the fight, and then suddenly, turning like a shoal of bright minnows, up and to the left—up, and into the rear of the cave trolls where they fought Flint’s people for the highest projection of the ridge. Up, and there was a flare of sorcery—and eldritch fire that played on the hills like holly in yule, white and red and green, as he sprung his last surprise, Tamsin’s fire stored against need.

And Morgon Mortirmir made one last effort, running clear of the back of the company line, raising his hand, and loosing two workings…

The cave trolls broke. Some fell broken to pieces, others ran, the earth collapsing under them, only to mire in the wet ground at the bottom of the valley and trap them to die there.

Flint’s bears, and Mogon, still tall in her cloak of feathers, gathered their survivors. The Faery Knight and his remaining riders placed themselves between them, and together they crashed down into the valley, destroying the last hope Thorn’s Wild levies might have had.

Everything else ran.

Leaving only Hartmut.

The brigans fought on, unshaken, and it seemed to Toby that they all must die—of broken hearts, burst lungs, and rain.

He was no longer fighting with skill. He hit men with the haft of the spear, or simply poked at them, and they at him.

The captain was still making parries and throwing blows. But even he was slowing, and his blows became more feeble. Finally Toby caught a glimpse when the captain’s sword went into an aventail—and came back, having done no damage.

But the horns, and the roars, were different. Toby had the spear locked under another man’s arm, and he couldn’t reach his dagger, and his life was in peril—and there was cheering. The other man pushed him down, wrenching his arm—dislocating his shoulder—and Toby went down, face-first, into the mud. But the cheering went on and Toby was determined not to die, and in a paroxysm of exhausted muscles he rolled over, dagger in hand.

The captain had put his sword in the other man’s eye. He pushed the corpse to the ground.

And then, the Black Knight was there, mounted on a tall black horse.

A space cleared. The brigans wanted no more fight, and yet were too proud to yield. But something had changed—the cheers were everywhere.

“I am Ser Hartmut Li Orguelleus,” he said. “I challenge you—face me, or be thought craven.”

Toby could only just see him—a huge figure in black armour. With a sword that burned like a torch, and made a faint sound, like running water.

Ser Gabriel coughed. But then he sighed and raised his visor. “Ser Hartmut,” he said.

“No!” roared Ser Gavin, and Ser Gabriel was thrown roughly to the ground. Gabriel looked up, somewhat surprised.

Ser Gavin towered over them on a sweat-besmothered war horse. His small axe dripped blood.

“My fucking brother has defrauded me of every worthwhile fight I should have had this spring,” he said. “I’m Ser Gavin Muriens, Ser Hartmut, and I insist on being the one to kill you.”

Ser Hartmut growled. Behind him, his men were flinching away down the hill.

Hartmut didn’t speak further. He reached up and pulled his heavy great helm off his back and over his head. Then, as his horse fretted, he took a heavy lance from his squire and sheathed his fiery sword.

He charged.

Ser Gavin had no lance.

He charged anyway.

Hartmut’s lance tip swooped down, and Gavin caught it on the haft of his little axe—his hand went out
under
the lance as the two horses crossed noses, and he caught the outside of his opponent’s bridle in his left hand.

The black horse twisted, attempting to right its head.

The reins snapped.

Gavin’s axe shot out—and struck Hartmut in the helmet. The blow did not damage him, but the Black Knight fell straight off his horse.